politics

Strongman Politics

I’ve discussed extensively the policy choices facing Americans in the 2020 presidential election and why I think Joe Biden’s policies would result in an improved world. However, I believe the best critique of Donald Trump’s candidacy doesn’t just dryly compare policy, but also takes into account all the “extracurriculars” that come with him.

As a warning, this post will be more partisan than other things I’ve written. I’d like to catalog some of the outrageous things Trump has done or said because there is a nebulous concern with Trump’s presidency that pure policy discussions can’t convey. Again, I’ll be aiming towards a center-right audience because that’s who I need to convince, but I also can’t imagine I’ll be saying anything new; Trump is obnoxious, self-serving, and corrupt and this is well known. I admit, I’m not sure why that knowledge hasn’t convinced conservatives to dump Trump, but generally speaking I think it’s true that conservatives have stuck with the president. Thus, in my last post, I mostly ignored these more outrageous discussions in favor of more dry policy comparisons. Nonetheless, for my own sanity, I think it’s worth reiterating just a small fraction of what the president has done over the last four years. Maybe putting it all in one place will prove more convincing than hearing constant headlines for years.

Before I get to Trump, I should point out that the Left has its own nebulous darkness on the horizon. Nothing I say here should be construed to downplay that threat. Manifestations of these bad ideas on the Left include broad attacks on the culture of open discourse and free speech, advancement of racism and segregation, support for radical violence, and aggrandizement of proven failed policies of state control of the means of production.

The reason for my focus in this essay on Donald Trump despite these concerns about the Left is twofold. One is that Donald Trump is tied directly to the worst ideas on the Right. Joe Biden is not similarly bound to the above enumerated problems. Secondly, there is a strong pushback on the Left against these more radical ideas. For example, countervailing groups on the Left established the Neoliberal Project, wrote the Letter on Justice and Open Debate in Harper’s Magazine this year, and most directly, decisively elected Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the primary.

On the Right however, conservatism has collapsed in the face of Trumpism. The Republican Party decided to forego writing a party platform this year in favor of stating they will “enthusiastically support the President’s America First agenda”. Meanwhile the Republican National Committee, the national organization that is responsible for electing Republican candidates up and down the ballot, merged its fundraising and spending with Trump’s reelection campaign, an unprecedented move reflecting Trump’s complete domination of the political Right.

Polarization

One of the first things that comes to mind about President Trump is his unpresidential behavior. He constantly interrupted Joe Biden during the first presidential debate, and Chris Wallace entered into several verbal altercations with the president, loudly pointing out that he had agreed to these rules he was constantly breaking. He spends press conferences with foreign leaders complaining about his own petty grievances instead of actually discussing the visit. He lies constantly and retweets conspiracy theories. Does any of this matter?

I would argue that one result is continued pressure on political polarization. At the same debate, Trump was asked to condemn white supremacy and seemed unwilling to denounce anyone who might support him. Joe Biden, on the other hand easily dealt with the issue by broadly condemning violence in any form, something he has done continually since May. Just after the debate, Trump criticized Representative Ilhan Omar, not for policy disagreements, but mostly based on where she was born despite her being an American citizen: “She’s telling us how to run our country. How did you do where you came from? How’s your country doing?” Again, this pushes us further from actual policy discussions, discussions which we should be having.

In fact, last year, Donald Trump told several sitting congresswomen that they ought to “go back” to their countries and fix them before telling “us” how to run “our” country. I have been concerned with the overzealous accusations of racism coming from leftists, but despite their misuse of the accusation, prejudice is still wrong. Attacking people for qualities they do not control, like where they were born, rather than engaging with their ideas is immoral and weak. In fact, three of the representatives were born in the United States, and the last came to America when she was 12. But that doesn’t matter, these are American citizens, elected to represent other American citizens, and it’s disturbing that the president does not identify them as Americans because of what they look like.

This is polarizing and it is bad for our country. The policies and arguments put forward by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar are often terrible, and those policies ought to opposed. But when the president attacks them for where they were born or what they look like, it appears that the choices are bad socialist ideas or bigotry, which alienates Americans and forces a false choice.

I won’t go into more details on other incidents, but it’s worth noting the president’s polarizing behavior here isn’t unique. He said people in the suburbs won’t have “low income housing” built in their neighborhoods. He said John McCain was only a war hero because he got captured and he likes “people who weren’t captured”. He made no attempt to deny the QAnon conspiracy theory when asked about it and instead said he appreciated that they like him, and Trump continued to advocate for hydrochloroquine as a COVID treatment months after the FDA had cancelled clinical trials because of its ineffectiveness.

Trump’s polarizing actions should disqualify him from the presidency. We need to focus on open discussion and debate, not increasing tribalism. Trump is incapable of moving the country in that direction.

Authoritarianism

Donald Trump has authoritarian tendencies. He has praised Kim Jong-un, he’s commended Xi Jinping installing himself as Chinese leader for life, and he’s even publicly sided with Vladimir Putin over American intelligence over whether there was Russian intelligence operations during the 2016 election. Focusing on specific actions, Trump cleared peaceful protesters outside the White House with pepper spray and police in riot gear in order to get an absurd photo op of him holding a Bible outside a church. Police attacked an Australian journalist live on TV. He also attempted to fire Bob Mueller as special counsel when he was being investigated, but White House counsel Don McGahn threatened to resign and he backed down. Recently, Trump has urged Attorney General Bill Barr to go after his political enemies with the Justice Department.

Trump also has a poor relationship with democratic elections. He has repeatedly sought to undermine his own election in 2016 (the election he won!) claiming, without evidence as usual, that millions of fraudulent votes were cast. Trump established a commission to look into this fraud, which seemingly dissolved without issuing a report or finding any evidence. Looking ahead, Trump has called for the 2020 election to be delayed, and when asked about the election, he has repeatedly refused to say he will accept the results. Note Biden had no problems answering Chris Wallace’s softball question, stating he would wait to declare victory until the election was certified and would concede if he lost. This isn’t particularly difficult or controversial, unless you are Donald Trump! Apparently the rule of law simply does not apply to him. Before and since the debate, Trump has continued to undermine the legitimacy of the election and voting by mail in ballots, even though many states have been voting by mail for years. Given the circumstances of the pandemic and logistical challenges of rapidly expanding mail in voting, Trump ought to be taking steps to make sure the election is legitimate and transparent, yet he has completely failed to do so.

Refusing to accept the principles of the rule of law, peaceful transfers of power, and election legitimacy ought to disqualify Trump from the ballots of voters. These are authoritarian strongman tactics, and they ought to be harshly condemned.

Corruption

It’s hard to distinguish Trump’s corruption from his authoritarian tendencies. Unlike staunchly ideological leaders who might wield state power and abridge the rights of their citizens in the name of communism or ethnic nationalism, Trump seems more comfortable with simply wielding state power for his own personal gain. Regardless of where its categorized, Trump’s administration is deeply corrupt.

Trump has reserved his pardon power almost exclusively for his political allies. Roger Stone was pardoned after lying to investigators to cover for Trump (although his sentence was excessive). Trump also pardoned former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, one of the most abusive law enforcement officers in the country, who was in prison after ignoring many court orders about his inhuman treatment of inmates. Arpaio had endorsed Trump in 2016. Trump has also rewarded his family members with high-ranking offices in the West Wing. On the other hand, Trump fired Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland after he was acquitted from impeachment charges in February. Both testified against the president.

Speaking of impeachment, Trump was impeached for abusing his office. On a 2019 official diplomatic call, Donald Trump asked the president of Ukraine to look into a wild conspiracy theory about a company in Ukraine having a copy of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Trump also asked the president to look into Joe Biden, his political rival, for wrongdoing. At the same time, foreign aid appropriated by Congress had been held up, according to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, specifically to put pressure on Ukraine to investigate this email server. Trump’s EU ambassador Gordon Sondlond also testified that a White House visit was offered to Ukraine in exchange for announcing an investigation into the Bidens, and apparently Mick Mulvaney, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton were all aware. The Trump administration however, blocked all three from testifying.

I know that this became a highly political issue and Trump’s senate trial declined to hear any witnesses along party lines, but I have yet to hear any reason to excuse the president’s behavior. Trump’s own hand picked staff all agree that the president used the office of the president to achieve these self-serving political goals which had nothing to do with the the good of the country.

This is wrong, and this is corrupt. The president cannot use the powerful mechanisms of the state for his own personal ends; we must be a nation of laws where authority is strictly bound to rules that apply to all. When the Senate declined to even hear witnesses to discuss the obvious crimes that Trump had committed, they said this ought to be left up to the electorate. The results of this election ought to reflect our opinion of whether the president is above the law.

Incompetence

Trump isn’t great at accomplishing the things he actually wants to accomplish. Trump has over and over again apparently appointed terrible people to work for him who he is then forced to fire. Trump fired Michael Flynn when indicted for lying to the FBI, H.R. McMaster by tweet, Anthony Scaramucci after 10 days, former RNC chair Reince Priebus and retired General John Kelly as chiefs of staff, Omoraosa Manigault from the Public Liaison Office, and Steve Bannon as chief strategist. Gary Cohn resigned because of Trump’s protectionist policies, and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis resigned in protest of Trump’s foreign policy. Tom Price was forced to resign as HHS Secretary after criticism of his use of private charters and military aircraft for travel, former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson was forced to resign when she didn’t stop accepting asylum seekers, Rex Tillerson was fired as Secretary of State after clashing with Trump’s policies for months, and Jeff Sessions was repeatedly abused by President Trump on Twitter for refusing to intervene in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference until Sessions resigned. Such absolute mayhem does not reflect well on the President’s ability to find the “best” people.

Consequently, despite having a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, Trump was unable to deliver on major pieces of policy like fixing Obamacare or cutting the deficit. Also, we should have a brief reminder of the constant bizarre behavior by the president these past four years. He didn’t have a single policy he could promise when Sean Hannity asked what his second term goals would be. He has also tweeted a conspiracy theory about TV personality Joe Scarborough being involved in a murder in 2001, and most recently that Obama had had Seal Team Six murdered. These do not seem like the actions of a competent leader. Regardless of all this chaos, the economy did fairly well until the biggest story of incompetence happened: COVID-19. Trump campaigned on being a good manager and private sector CEO. I’ve expressed in the past that I didn’t think management skills mattered much in politics compared to policy, but every now and then there’s a crisis that needs managing. We got one this year and Trump has abjectly failed.

200,000 Americans are dead directly from the pandemic and the CDC estimates 250k in excess mortality since February. Trump lied to Americans about what he knew about the virus and played it down instead of sounding the alarm. Trump’s CDC and FDA had major failures that delayed testing. Then, in the summer once cases had finally started to drop, instead of trying to continue that trend, he held and has continued to hold crowded rallies. He mocked people for wearing masks, and most importantly, claimed we only had rising case numbers because of better testing. Later, in August, Trump retweeted a claim that COVID had only killed 9,000 Americans. In an Axios interview in July, Trump literally couldn’t understand the reporter talking to him about rising U.S. deaths, simply declaring that you couldn’t use that metric. Not to mention, the White House held an event in the Rose Garden to promote Amy Coney Barrett as their new Supreme Court nominee without good precautions, infecting several members of the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the President himself. On Saturday, October 10, just two weeks later, a large rally was held on the White House lawn.

The level of incompetence here and the cost in human lives is simply unspeakable.

Future of Conservatism

Finally, returning to appeal more directly conservatives, the American Right is at a fork in the road. The Cold War anti-communist coalition of social conservatives, libertarians, business interests, and nationalists has completely fallen apart. This process has been long in the works, but the schism accelerated in the 2016 election, and now conservatives can choose to be on the side of individual liberty or authoritarianism.

Donald Trump has pulled the Republican Party towards authoritarian nationalism. He abhors the rule of law and the international liberal order, and he undermines the ideas of peaceful transitions of power or a separation of public and personal interest. The GOP party platform literally doesn’t exist. But these authoritarian ideas don’t stem from Trump alone; there are others working to maintain these ideas and platforms into the future, and it has resulted in some disturbing events. Right wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer was praised by Trump and even endorsed by Representative Matt Gaetz despite her association with InfoWars as well as her openly wishing violence upon immigrants.

On the intellectual side, Adrian Vermuele argues in The Atlantic that conservative legal theory ought not to focus on originalism, but instead read morality into the law along with respect for authority and the importance of social hierarchies since “…the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself.” This has long been a strain in conservative thought, but usually, at least in countries like the U.S. and U.K., conservative defense of institutions has often included individual rights and the market.

The Economist notes that what’s remarkable about Trump’s insurgent brand of “conservatism” is a complete trashing of institutions across the spectrum. The message has been to “beat” the Left at any cost, regardless of Trump’s flagrant disinterest of freedom or morality. I’m not here to say Adrian Vermuele is the future of conservatism, but rather that if the intellectual Right is abandoning individual liberty and limited government under Trump, there are people with actual bad ideas waiting to fill the vacuum. Rejecting Trump is a way to avoid going down that path.

And the stakes are high. The political Left, as I mentioned earlier, is undergoing some disturbing trends. Robert Tracinski writes in The Bulwark that if we take the threat of the Left seriously, this election may be the Anti-Flight 93 Election; it’s the last chance to kick out Trump and get the political Right’s house in order before the leftists come knocking. Now is the time to do this when the cost is relatively low with “sleepy” Joe Biden. We need the alternative to socialism to be a vibrant communicator who can articulate the importance of the rule of law and the free enterprise system; if we are stuck with a self-absorbed authoritarian strongman with no ideology or understanding of economics, the socialists will be ascendant. And moreover, a loss for Biden would be a signal to the radical Left that appeals to the middle are dead; a convincing Biden victory is a way for more moderate parts of the Democratic party to muscle out the Bernie bros.

Finally, I’m not alone in this thought. Conservative columnist George Will, former National Review writer David French, and former editor at National Review Jonah Goldberg are all prominent right wing thinkers who oppose Trump despite being staunchly opposed to the Left. I doubt they’ll vote for Biden, but they definitely won’t be voting for the president. The only path forward for a strong American Right is to reject Donald Trump.

Photo: White House, public domain image.

Should You Vote? And How?

This post is a discussion of the U.S. voting system and the implications for strategic voting. The general conclusions are:

You should vote if the election is competitive
You should spend time researching candidates in competitive elections
In competitive elections, identified differences in policies between major party candidates makes it worth voting for a major party and not a third party
This includes smaller elections, but may not include voting for president as many states are uncompetitive

Soon I will be discussing in depth specific presidential candidates, but this post does not contain any endorsements and instead contains all the other information you might want to consider before actually researching and ranking candidates.

There’s a lot of extensive calculations doing the cost-benefit analysis, so it may be more interesting to skip around to the sections you find most interesting.

Why Do We Vote?

Harder and Krosnick (2008) suggest a variety of reasons people vote, some of which take into account cost-benefit analysis elements like the ease of registering to vote, strong differences in preferences of candidates, and the closeness of elections. They also identify many other qualities associated with voting which seem to be unrelated to the actual election, like voter demographics (education level, age, race, marital status), feelings of duty, and civic organization membership.

Generally speaking, I think most people vote by trying to select the “best” candidate through their personal lens, and they often ignore strategic voting. In contrast, I would like to cautiously advocate thinking about voting more in terms of a cost-benefit or “rational” approach.

I think voting analysis should be done in a more rigorous, forward-looking way because this approach forces a much deeper interaction with the democratic system (and the problems inherent with it). If we keep our interaction with the system relatively shallow and devoid of analysis, we can’t fix major problems that govern the voting rules themselves. It can also lead to tribalism and groupthink when actual solutions require significant problem solving and nuance.

I was inspired to think about this recently when a friend asked who I planned to cast my presidential vote for, especially since I’ve talked about third parties in the past. I responded that I hadn’t thought much about who I’d personally vote for, since I live in an extremely uncompetitive state. She surprisingly disregarded this point, and asked more pointedly who I was going to vote for. The implication seemed to largely be tribal signalling; what mattered is that we’re all on the right side, not whether our actions are actually effective.

I think this way of viewing the political system is relatively common and generally bad. Everyone has nuanced views shaped by their perspective, experience, background, etc. We should strive to create a political system with robust voting (like approval voting or score voting!) that is able to capture lots of information from voters, instead of what it currently does which is allow many ballots to be purely signalling.

However, in this blog post, I’ll be taking our troubled electoral system as is, and assume that I am unlikely to change it today, or to convince many other people to change their thinking about the electoral system. Given what we know about how ballots will be cast, what should I (and my relatively small base of readers) do to strategically maximize the payoffs in this nationwide election?

Should you vote at all?

I detailed a lot of issues with the American electoral system in the last post: uncompetitive elections, bad voting systems, gerrymandering, etc. Given all of that, whether to vote at all is an important question! Voting requires time and effort, time that could be spent in other ways that improve the world. Many libertarians don’t vote, pointing out that the chances of your vote deciding an election are minuscule. But this excellent paper (Edlin, Gelman, Kaplan 2007) makes a rigorous case for why they should.

The “waste of time” argument can be compared to arguments against playing the lottery. Yes, the payoffs if you were to cast the deciding vote in a tied election are huge, just like winning the lottery could be life-changing. Yet, you are unlikely to win the lottery. Edlin et al take this argument head on, modeling it using this equation:

$Net Utility = pB - c$

Utility is the term we’re using to describe whether voting is worth it
p is the probability of changing the election outcome
B is the benefit from voting
c is the cost of voting

Basically, if the benefit of deciding the election (i.e. winning the lottery) times the chance of changing the election (the election is tied until you vote) is higher than the cost of voting, we should vote. Unfortunately, p is absurdly small. It’s proportional to the total number of voters, and it’s not uncommon for many of our elections to include hundreds of thousands, if not millions of voters. There’s also the issue that many elections are uncompetitive. Thus this modified equation from the paper:

$Net Utility = \frac{K}{n}B - c$

n is the total number of voters
K is based on the closeness of the election (it’s the inverse of the expected percentage margin of victory). It reflects what fraction of the vote is actually “swing voters”.

More on K, for most competitive elections where we expect our candidate to get between 45-55% of the vote, K would be about 10. It is inverse to how close we expect the spread to be, so if polling indicates the candidates are within the margin of error (the closest possible election we could measure), we expect K to peak at around 25 (indicating a 4% margin of error). As elections become more of a blowout, K trends towards 1. But even if the election is close, and you estimate thousands of dollars difference in payoff between the candidates, the number of voters, n is a major problem as it quickly erases any chance of you actually affecting the outcome. Note if you add in the benefits of your family or future children, it’s not going to help much as this number is fixed and small, while the total number of voters is often in the millions.

Ok, so now the good news: the paper points out that the vast majority of voters care about what happens to the country, not just themselves. It is true that for voters completely uninterested in everyone else’s well-being, there is no reason to vote in most cases. But if you take into account the wider social benefits, then voting is often beneficial:

$Net Utility = \frac{KN}{n}\alpha b - c$

Here, we’ve exchanged capital B for Nɑb, where:

B was the total benefit
b is the benefit per person
ɑ is the amount you discount others’ benefits compared to your own
N is the total population of the jurisdiction of the election

N is usually a lot larger than the actual number of voters n, but the ratio of N/n depends on the jurisdiction versus the voters. For a gubernatorial election, it’s probably ~2.5, but for a congressional election, N is the whole country, while n is only your state or district. This is looking pretty good now.

There’s not much guidance of ɑ since it’s really up to the person, although the paper uses an example of ɑ = 0.1. How valuable is it to you that random strangers are $100 better off? Most people give some to charity and so clearly ɑ is something, but intuitively it doesn’t seem to be 1 since that would imply you’re indifferent between keeping all your money and giving it to a stranger. Sometimes there are “matching” charity drives, but those don’t necessarily seem more successful than regular charity, so that might imply ɑ < 0.5. The the rest of this post, we’ll use 0.1 and K=10, since those seem like reasonable assumptions and so that these terms will cancel out. Feel free to recalculate with your own values.

The Close Elections Assumption

Close elections are doing a lot of heavy lifting in this model. For the remainder of the post, I’ll be assuming that the election being discussed is close, but I should note, this actually isn’t that common. Most incumbents are handily reelected, and 34 states are at 90% or higher to vote for one presidential candidate or another a couple months before the election. There are a variety of ways to check if an individual election is actually close, and this should always be the first step before even checking out the costs and benefits of an election. They include prediction markets like PredictIt or Betfair. We’ll discuss the electoral college more directly, including swing states, later in this post, but larger elections for senator and governor might have prediction markets which can tell you when to expect a blowout. For House races, there are some prediction markets for very competitive races, but another good resource is the Cook Political Report which categorizes House races as “solid”, “likely”, “leans”, and “tossups”.

Resources for local elections for state legislature are harder to come by. Historical data can be helpful to lookup an incumbent, but sometimes this information just isn’t available. If anyone has any good advice on how to gather information for local elections, please send it to me on Twitter or leave a comment. I would love to expand this section.

K means we still shouldn’t vote in blowout elections, N/n we will address at each election, and now we just need to calculate b and c.

Costs

This isn’t straightforward, but we can estimate the cost c based on a few variables, resulting in a range for most people from an hour to a few hours. If we take the median U.S. wage of ~$20, that’s $20-$60, although since I would hope that my readership would have really high time valuations (OTOH the length of this post clearly indicates I have too much free time), that might push this range more like $50-$150. This cost of voting includes the time and effort to register to vote, research the candidates, and fill out the ballot.

Registration time costs can vary wildly. You might already be registered as most DMVs will ask if you want to register while you’re there. But if you’ve moved since your last DMV visit, you often have to fill out a form and mail it in. Finding the forms, filling it out, mailing it, etc is going to cost some time, although if you don’t move again before the next election, you can split that cost across several election cycles. If you don’t have an ID at all because you don’t drive, your state might require an entire trip to the DMV (although voter ID laws vary). I’d estimate such a situation would likely triple the cost of just voting and research time. Next, research is essential if we are going to count the social benefits b towards reasons we should vote. Obviously, we all approach politics with our own biases and viewpoints. However, I think I can still advocate for a systematic approach, trying to find the issues that have the broadest impact on the world and then comparing the candidates on those specific issues. Voting itself doesn’t take too long especially if you can request an absentee ballot which I would have recommended even before the pandemic.

Candidate research has challenges; it can be difficult to track down candidate positions. If candidates haven’t held office before, they have no record to look up, and you’re left sifting through their vague campaign websites, tweets, or speeches. You could rely on party affiliation, but that may not map well onto issues you care about. Even if you do generally prefer generic Republicans over Democrats or vice versa, a cursory lookup of each candidate is vital, as you never know when an extremist or controversial candidate could slip by, trying to ride party affiliation to office.

National or statewide races tend to be less costly in research terms since you might already be somewhat familiar with the candidates and any differences they have, so I would expect this model to support voting in more prominent races more unambiguously. This is a change from how I thought about voting in the past.

For the rest of the post, I’m going to use $300 as the cost for voting because it seems likely to be far higher than the actual cost for most people; if we can show voting (in close elections) makes sense at this cost, we’ll have shown it for the vast majority of readers.

Benefits

That covers the costs of voting, what about the payoffs? The bottom line is that the government in the U.S. is pretty large. With a fiscal budget of trillions of dollars, even small changes can have large payoffs. This means that for most (competitive) federal elections, it’s almost always worth it to vote. State officials depend on the state budget and impact of state laws, but they too are often worth voting in.

There is, of course, uncertainty in this model. For single executive positions like President and Governor, we can be reasonably sure of policy differences which we might be able to quantify. For example, Trump has significantly reduced legal immigration into the country, while Biden has opposed this move. Legal immigrants are quite likely to start businesses and pay taxes, and so the order of magnitude difference in benefits from this Biden policy over Trump is at least in the tens of billions of dollars. Of course, immigrants can start major companies that have huge impacts on the country, like Google, eBay, and Tesla. These second order effects start to complicate how long it takes us to research candidates and compare across many issues, and with the higher research costs, the higher the benefits have to be to justify all this work.

So we’ve got uncertainty in how well we can quantify any specific policy issue, but we also are uncertain about which policies will be important; most people didn’t know terrorism was going to be presidential issue a year after the 2000 election, nor pandemics four years after the 2016 election.

Nonetheless, the following sections explore best estimates we can make about prospective candidates and incumbents to see if voting is worth the effort, given some reasonable assumptions. Moreover, with the cost of voting we calculated of $300, we only have to believe there is a difference in payoff between candidates of a few hundred dollars per capita for voting to be clearly worth it. These sections are pretty dense showing the work, so feel free to read as much or as little as seems interesting before moving on to the section about uncompetitive elections.

Governor

We can reach the $300 threshold most simply for gubernatorial elections. As stated earlier, to calculate the benefits side of the equation we can cancel out K and ɑ, leaving us N*b/n. Gubernatorial elections are simpler because N is the population of the state and n is the number of voters of a state (in e.g. Senate elections N is the whole county while n depends on each state so the ratio varies widely). The ratio of population to voters is between two and three for governor races, so I’m calling it 2.5. With c=$300, dividing that by 2.5 yields b>$120 for Net Utility to be positive. Meaning we only have to see a difference of $120 in expected per capita benefit between gubernatorial candidates for it to make sense to vote (and probably that’s too high).

Can we do that? Here is a list of U.S. states with their accompanying budgets, including per capita budgets. $120 per capita is lower than 6% of the budget of all states. I suspect different governors can result in 6% of the budget going to different places. Additionally, state governments also pass plenty of non-fiscal legislation which won’t show up on our budgetary calculations, but is likely a major part of whatever gubernatorial candidates run on. I’d argue that reaching a $120 per person difference in expected outcomes between two candidates is pretty doable if the election is competitive.

Finally, note that similar logic applies to all state officials that run in statewide races.

House

For legislative elections, uncertainty becomes much worse, as there is additional complications introduced when legislators are part of a much larger body.

If we take the cost of voting as conservatively high at $300, then we just need the benefits of voting to be higher than that, even if figuring out the actual benefits is hard. Again this is down to Nb/n. N here is the whole country, so it’s easier to combine it with b to create the full benefit for the whole country of one House candidate winning over the other. That’s what we’re trying to find out. n is the number of voters in a House district. It varies, but is usually between 200,000 and 400,000. Worst case scenario is 400,000. In this worst case then, Nb, the total benefit of a candidate winning has to be greater than $120 million.

Can we convince ourselves that a House seat is worth more than that? I think we can do a clever lower bound estimate on how valuable a House seat is by looking at single-margin House votes over a two year period since that’s the length of a term.

Thinking through this problem: half the time a close vote goes the way you want, and half the time it doesn’t. Additionally, ties count as failures to pass, so changing a two-vote bill passage to a tie counts as a flip, but a two-vote defeated bill that turns into a tie is still defeated. You can take a look at my data and script here, but it’s not an exact science. I’m not checking whether these votes are actual final passage, discussions of House rules, rules of debate, or even if it’s actually a 3/5 vote that just happens to fail with a tie. In fact, the data source I’m using called voteview seems to have some inaccurate data compared to the House website, so any conclusions we take should be ballpark estimates. Nonetheless, since 1991, I find we would only expect a flipped House seat to change a couple votes a year. In a two year term, we’ll call it one to four votes. Maybe there are a few more that are simply not seen in this data set, but I would be surprised if there were more than say…10 per term.

So what does this mean? The sheer size of the federal budget means even small changes can have large payoffs; even a hundredth of a percent of the federal budget would be hundreds of millions of dollars. Individual legislators can submit amendments to fiscal bills which could change a hundredth of a percent of the budget. But since the amendments process is strongly controlled by House leadership, it’s hard to say how much power there really is at the individual legislator level. There are also non-fiscal bills whose fate is much more in the balance; a single failed vote could mean they never pass at all (examples might include Obamacare or free trade agreements).

Essentially, this is a fat-tailed scenario (the average is dominated by outliers). Most of the time, I’d guess your representative doesn’t cast deciding votes, and those deciding votes aren’t on interesting things. But every once in a while, they likely stick in an amendment or pass a bill that has a massively outsized impact that far exceeds the $120 million threshold. Still, I should admit that this is tricky .

Obviously, if the House majority were in the balance, that would pretty quickly explode the benefits of a House election, as your vote for your representative would contribute to your preferred party holding the House, assuming you prefer one party over the other. For full calculations, check Footnote 1, but it would significantly outweigh the costs discussed if the House were in the balance (this year it appears it is not).

There’s a lot of uncertainty. Quantification of policies is hazy at best, and it’s also very difficult to predict individual candidate’s actual votes or which votes will actually happen. I think future research in this area should explore situations where important issues are entirely ignored by candidates (or by Congress), as reasoning here is hard. Nonetheless, important policy differences likely exist and so it makes sense to undertake the cost of researching candidates in close House elections.

Related: I would really appreciate a website that lists every close vote so voters can look up their representative and see (A) if these votes were important and (B) whether they agree with the way in which their representative voted.

I am least confident in this section’s calculations, but assuming risk aversion of outlier scenarios (or the House being in the balance), I think we’ve gathered enough evidence that the better candidate winning would result in more than $120 million dollar difference.

Senate

Similar “close votes” logic can be applied to the Senate, although it’s complicated with the Vice President who can break ties. You can see some of the methodology discussion in Footnote 2.

Again, the methodology is rough, and I haven’t been able to count cloture votes which are often important, as well the fact that we are overcounting actual close votes, since some of these are listed as 51-49 when in reality they were cloture votes which needed 60 ayes and they weren’t close at all. I count something like ~6 votes flipped per year if you flip a Senate seat. At 6 year terms, that’s ~36 votes flipped per election, but again, this is an overestimate of close votes, but an underestimate of cloture votes. At best this gives us an order of magnitude estimate. There is another source of uncertainty when senators vote against their party, which I found slightly more common in the Senate than the House, so keep that in mind as well (538 has some data on that here).

Looking up close votes, it’s clear they vary a lot in importance. The latest roll call vote I could actually find that was a single vote victory (roll call 51) was an amendment adding boilerplate language to the joint resolution to prevent the US from attacking Iran without congressional authorization. Flipping this vote seems like it’d have no impact on anyone’s life. Roll call 30 is much more interesting. In it, 47 democrats, Susan Collins, and Mitt Romney voted to subpoena John Bolton for the senate trial of the president. The vote failed as 51 Republicans voted against it. Here, clearly an additional democratic vote would have been large in revealing whatever John Bolton would have said, although likely would have remained far short of the 67 votes needed to remove him from office.

Generally speaking, I think we can say there are more close votes in the Senate due to being a smaller chamber and having six year terms instead of two. Additionally the Senate also has more responsibility in major appointments. I estimate 4-10x as many close votes and more important votes. However, the number of voters in a Senate race varies massively since districts are not population adjusted like in the House. For example, the 2018 California Senate election had 11 million votes, while the Wyoming Senate election had only 200,000, basically equivalent to a House district. Of course, we should note that the Wyoming Senate election wasn’t close and the California senate seat wasn’t that close either, and even then it was between two Democrats so the difference in payoff was likely smaller than between a Republican and Democrat. Here’s a worst case scenario for Senate benefits in California. Again, were looking for Nb as that’s the benefit to the entire country of a Senate seat flipping:

That’s $3.3 billion. Can we find that in close Senate votes over six years? I think so. Unlike highly variable and rare House votes, we can usually guarantee at least one close vote will happen on an important topic. $3.3billion is less than a percent of non-military discretionary spending, so this seems plausible.

Our conclusions are similar to the House elections. In close elections, it makes a lot of sense to vote even though there is going to be a lot of uncertainty in what votes elected officials will actually face and even what their position could be. Voters in smaller states with close Senate elections have the largest expected payoffs. If you’re uncertain about which candidate is better because of previously mentioned issues with candidates ignoring your primary issues or split among important ones, close Senate elections in small states are probably worth the time to sit down and try and do some estimations of each candidate and policy payoffs.

The Electoral College

I wrote about the implications of the electoral college for third parties in 2016. This year’s post on strategic voting is an elaboration on that model, so even though I’ve taken a slightly different editorial position, the implications for president are similar. It all comes down to the K variable we’ve been using. I’ve had to preface every recommendation with the fact that the election must be close, because even Edlin at al don’t say there’s a positive payoff to vote if the election is already decided.

This most often asserts itself in the presidential election with the electoral college. The way to think about this idea is the “Tipping Point Jurisdiction”. If we listed every state in order by (Trump percentage) – (Biden percentage), and then added up the number of electoral votes, the state that puts either one above 270 is the tipping point. In 2016, this was Wisconsin. Even though Michigan was closer in percentage points, Clinton would have needed to win Michigan, Pennsylvania, and then Wisconsin to get 270 electoral votes. In 2000, this was famously Florida. Your vote for president is only decisive if cast in the Tipping Point Jurisdiction.

Here is a prediction market for chances of any state becoming the Tipping Point state. Because of PredictIt’s fee structure, these probabilities are slightly inflated, and I wouldn’t trust much in a market below 5% to reflect what bettors actually thought. Additionally, it’s still relatively early in the election cycle, so we’d expect more certainty as we get closer to election day.

State	Predict It %	538 %
PA	23	23
FL	22	24
WI	14	10.4
MN	8	8.9
MI	8	6.4
AZ	7	5.3
NC	6	3.7
NV	4	2.8
OH	3	2.7
Total:	95	87.2

This isn’t meant to be a projection, but just a snapshot that we can use. Even today, two months before the election we’re 90% sure that one of these states will be the tipping point state. The payoff equation for these swing states is pretty clear:

Nb is again going to be the full benefit to the country (actually, I guess the world?) if one candidate is president compared to another.
n is the number of voters in your swing state
p_t is going to be the chance your state is the tipping point jurisdiction, which is what table above shows
p_m is the probability that the margin of the electoral college ends up being less than the electoral votes in your state.

These ideas are taken from this paper by Gelman, Silver, and Edlin. To get a rough estimate, we can use this prediction market, which suggests for most states p_m is probably only 10-20%, although that could change as we get closer to election. We probably need a full table of probabilities, but here’s Florida’s calculations:

So if there’s a difference in the world of Biden being president over Trump of $76 billion, it’d be worth it to vote in Florida, although it’d be good to redo the calculations with updated numbers closer to election day. Can we get to that number by comparing Biden and Trump? I think so, but you’ll have to wait until my next blog post for the full discussion.

Additional Offices

I don’t have much to add here because advice becomes exceedingly hard to give. The math suggests that state legislator elections will actually scale marginally well since you have a much smaller pool of voters and thus your vote is worth more, precisely outweighing the loss of stakes when switching from federal to state elections. You can try to do the same trick I did earlier with small vote margins in state legislatures, and I’d be curious what you find. Many states are dominated by one party and so I can imagine fewer close votes, but I don’t know. However, as mentioned earlier, the costs to obtain good information might be much harder. Single office elections like Mayor seem much more likely to be easier to calculate benefits and compare candidates.

But What If It’s Not Close?

The short answer is: don’t worry about uncompetitive elections.

The longer answer is: there might be a couple marginal reasons to vote. For example, in presidential elections, ballot access for third parties often depends on small thresholds for third party votes, like 2% or 5%. These might be achievable if you prefer third parties and live in a non-swing state. This is likely what I will personally do, as I live in an uncompetitive state, and tend to favor libertarian candidates.

Also, a quick note on personal enjoyment; some people really like voting. I’ve eschewed psychological reasoning in the rest of this post, but we can’t ignore that a sense of duty or tribal fervor could also be a benefit you get that outweighs the cost of waiting in line or filling out registration forms. The reason I only include those benefits in this section is that unlike benefits from policy, these psychological benefits do not accrue to your fellow citizens. In close elections what should motivate our actions is what would actually improve the world.

When it comes to Donald Trump, there have been predictions and accusation by Obama and Trump of election engineering that could occur during this election. This is concerning. If you strongly support or oppose Donald Trump, it may be worth it to vote even in uncompetitive states to push the popular vote total in your direction in the hopes of making the vote such a rout that a constitutional crisis is impossible. I’m unsure to what extent this will matter in the case of a contested election compared to election results in swing states, but The Economist thinks a decisive popular vote could assure an uneventful transition of power. In swing states, I recommend voting for a major party anyway.

Third Parties in Close Elections

In perhaps a disappointment for my libertarian skewing readership, it only makes sense to vote for third parties in elections that aren’t close. For good or bad, there are tons of uncompetitive elections, and I think third parties, and the Libertarian Party in particular should continue to target those elections. In gerrymandered districts where single party rule dominates, they have a chance to become a real “second party”. The payoff of who is in government is actually really high, and so on expectation, it makes sense to choose a specific major party candidates when both have a chance to win.

That doesn’t mean you can’t advocate for voting reform (reminder that approval voting is on the ballot in St. Louis this year!), or call your senator, or donate money to libertarian causes, it just means that some elections matter and you can have real impact by deciding the winner.

Footnotes

Footnote 1: House majority calculations. If you see strong differences between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy deciding which legislation is brought to the floor, that could potentially be worth tens of billions of dollars, maybe even $100 billion. I’m doubtful it would be worth much more than that though, as this is only one chamber of one branch of government. And of course, if you’re a libertarian who disagrees with much of what both Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy believe, then such differences in majority control are smaller. The analysis here would be like a second order election on top of your vote for local congressman. Assuming House majority control is in the balance in the election (this year, it doesn’t appear to be), you’d need to add another term to our equations to account for smaller probability of your representative casting the deciding vote for Speaker. We’d thus multiply by an additional K/n where K=10 and n=435 for all House members.

We’ll cancel out K and α, Nb is the full benefit of a certain party being in control, n= between 200,000-400,000 for most House districts. The second fraction K_H/n_H = 0.023. Overall, this works out to ~$5000 ballpark estimate for a $50B difference in majority control. Obviously, this would make it worth it to vote in House elections, although again, that’s not likely to be on the table in this election.

Footnote 2: Senate calculations. The Vice president acts like an extra Senator. So if the VP is someone you agree with, you can take that into account (or vice versa). But if there’s uncertainty (for example, we don’t know who will be Vice President in 2021), you can estimate that half the time the VP votes in your interests. The other half of the time your “side”, however you define that, loses the vote. An extra senator would flip those votes because the tie would be broken before the VP votes (i.e. the VP could break a tie against your side if it’s 50-50, but doesn’t get a chance to if the vote is 51-49). I downloaded Senate vote data here and looked at votes from 1991 on. You can find my code and data here.

Picture credit: League of Women Voters of California, licensed under CC-BY-2.0

A 2020 Policy Platform Proposal

It’s election season so it’s time to start talking electoral politics again. The Trump administration has been particularly successful in ignoring policy discussions in favor of political point scoring. This isn’t too surprising given Trump’s lack of consistent ideology, apart from perhaps opposition to free trade and immigration. Impeachment has also helped focus attention on Trump’s political situation rather than his policies or lack thereof. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a strong non-policy case against Trump, and I think in particular Congressman Justin Amash has done an excellent job in articulating why Trump’s behavior is concerning.

However, I think there is also a policy-based critique of Trump. In order to properly make that case and compare Trump’s policies to Biden’s or other candidates, we must establish a foundation declaring which problems are most important, and what policies could be used to implement them. Criteria for these policy ideals include some utilitarian calculus, i.e., how to improve the lives of the most people in the largest way. Thus, the first of these policies is actually a meta-policy, a way to improve congressional power to pass laws and run the state. Changing the way we make policy can affect all of our future policy making.

Countering this interest in utilitarian idealism is a preference for some political feasibility; in other words, while I might prefer to emphasize revolutionary changes that significantly improve the country (changing all of our voting systems to approval voting or quadratic voting or switching taxation to be based on land value), I’ve left them off this list because they are not just unpopular, but in fact virtually never discussed. If you find a particular policy interesting, please follow the links in that section for additional policy discussion and details.

Finally, there is uncertainty here, and I’ll mention other policies that didn’t make this list at the end. Trying to filter major talking points out of a broader range of political ideas is difficult. Policies and political philosophies are interconnected, and where I’m drawing boundaries must be arbitrary. Nonetheless, these ideas should form a good basis for uniformly judging candidate policies.

Congressional Power

Any policy platform has to address the fact that our current system for governance, for crafting and enacting policy, is deeply flawed. We have uncompetitive and broken elections, we have bad ways of choosing candidates, and we have too much power in the executive branch. Executive authority compounds our problems by making each election a stark singular choice between polarized sides instead of a well rounded government built on a legislature with many interests represented. I can’t fix all of these in this policy platform, so improving the balance between the president and Congress seems like a good place to start.

The entire budget for the legislative branch, including congressional staff, offices, and congressional agencies like the GAO and CBO, is about $5 billion. Congress is then responsible for oversight and legislative action for the entire $5 trillion federal government. The CBO has a mere 250 person staff, and it can’t even research and score all Congressional bills. This is absolute insanity.

Congress needs to be able to wield its muscle. It should not be relying on executive branch bureaucracies as unbiased experts evaluating their own performance. It should have a better staffed research arm which can oversee all aspects of the massive American bureaucracy. Congressmen also need to have more and more policy-focused positions on their own staff, along with fewer committee assignments. National Affairs has an excellent in depth discussion of the thinking behind this brief overview. Legislators are currently underpaid amateurs who spend half their time outside of Washington focused on other things besides governance. This does not allow for knowledgeable congressional oversight of the federal government.

Cato also has some excellent ideas for strengthening Congress such as having a standing committee to review executive overreaches from statutory law, and forcing votes on major rules as implemented by regulators or bureaucrats. Other ideas include expanding the congressional calendar, making a new Congressional Regulatory Service to oversee the regulations made by independent and executive agencies, and requiring all civil asset forfeitures to be deposited into the Treasury to be spent by Congress, not the executive.

Unfortunately, even despite a recent impeachment trial this is simply not a major political issue in this year’s campaign, and no candidate is running with strengthening Congress as a priority. In fact, there are essentially no meta-policy ideas being floated. Yet ideas are not hard to come by!

Liberalizing Immigration

The U.S. immigration system is terrible (see section 8 here). It is esoteric, slow, and requires a complete overhaul. It should have a focus on a merit-based system rather than nation-of-origin and family ties as it does now. It should be simpler for high-skilled workers to be hired by American companies and it should definitely be easier for young workers, educated at excellent American colleges, to be hired by American companies and remain in the United States where they can pay tax dollars for decades.

Why is this so high up on the list?

This is a matter of national security. China is a growing power, but crucially, it cannot expand its influence or economy through immigration. The Chinese state has largely decided that ethnicity matters, and China is not seeking to create a multicultural amalgamation to improve the world, but rather a nationalist state. The U.S. isn’t restricted in this way; anyone can be an American. Immigrants are also more likely to start businesses and take risks. That means the most creative and ambitious people in the world can come to the United States and contribute to our culture, knowledge, technology, and wealth. Moreover, these remarkable people already want to come here. Increased dynamism and economic growth also makes the rest of our geopolitical challenges easier; it means the national debt is less of a burden, and national defense spending can be higher in absolute terms while costing less of a percentage of GDP.

This is also perhaps the best and simplest way to improve the world quickly. It’s extremely difficult to improve nations with poor institutions, yet people who struggle in developing nations can be immediately more productive if they are transplanted to the U.S. And of course many are quite willing to do so, uprooting their entire lives for a chance at the American Dream. We can pursue limitations on their access to public money, or a simple tax upon immigrating, but nonetheless we should be voting to improve the world in the most altruistic and nationalistic way possible: expanding legal immigration in order to make more Americans!

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

This is a specific policy taken from the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson. Cited on this blog before, he suggests giving federal money to urban areas that add large amounts of new housing stock. Why? Because American cities are absurdly expensive to live in, yet new housing is extremely difficult to develop due to overregulation and zoning laws.

The impact of our poor housing policy is enormous. Economists suggest housing constraints have lowered U.S. GDP by as much as a third over the last 50 years. Think about that. We could be missing a third of GDP because millions of people who wanted to move somewhere for a better job couldn’t find a place to live. It’s clear that the most productive areas in the U.S., especially cities like New York and San Francisco, are prohibitively expensive, keeping out potential new productive workers.

Wilkinson’s suggestion isn’t the only possible policy solution; another is to change zoning to be hyper local, composed by residents of a single street or city block. This would allow experimentation and innovation, instead of immovable local land interests which keep out future non-residents who can’t vote in today’s elections.

While the viable solutions are still up for the debate, the impact is clear: the lack of housing development in U.S. cities due to overregulation may be the single greatest barrier to economic growth, thus earning its inclusion on this short list of policies.

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Ever since Pete Buttigieg announced his support for this policy, I’ve had it circled for inclusion on this list. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure, has not reduced drug use, and has radically increased prison populations. There have been extraordinary costs to the taxpayer in both civil liberties and assets. Massive application of state force has helped to give a monopoly in funding to the most bloodthirsty and gruesome organized criminal elements in the world, including terrorists. There have even been spillover effects as governments crack down on prescription pain killers, leaving patients in agony.

This policy is wrong morally, practically, and economically. It is not the place of the state to determine what substances informed adults can consume or inject. It is also abundantly clear the state has zero capability to halt the trade or consumption of drugs. Rather, enforcement of drug laws have bolstered a black market where information is asymmetric and scarce, endangering all involved. The only thing the state has succeeded in doing is making organized crime more financially viable. The resulting conflict in Mexico has killed over 150,000 people, making it one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century behind only the Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, and Darfur. It is this monstrous loss of human life as a result of changeable government policy that places this item so high on this list.

And of course it goes without saying that this massive assistance to organized crime is occurring at great financial cost. Estimates for enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, and military interventions are as high as $50 billion a year. State prohibition of private mutually consensual transactions also requires erosion of our rights in ways that frustrate measures of concrete financial cost. The ACLU notes extensive surveillance has been justified under the guise of drug enforcement while increasingly militarized police forces have abused their power to break into homes unannounced or preemptively shoot victims all in the name of stopping transactions among consenting adults. It’s time to end this failed policy.

Catastrophic Risk

It’s clear today that the federal government does not respond well to large disasters. Perhaps too much relies upon the whims of the executive who happens to be in power, but it seems likely that we could institutionalize better responses to catastrophic events. Yes, this includes pandemics, but also major earthquakes, solar flares, artificial intelligence, and even plans for averting nuclear war (for a more detailed analysis, read Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice).

This is a highly neglected problem and thus one of the highest impact policies we could undertake (climate change could go here, but it has not been quite as neglected a topic as other risks, so I’ve detailed it later). At the beginning of 2020, I would not have included this in the list of top policies, not because it was low impact, but simply due to the fact that it was not discussed as a major political issue. The failings of the federal government to respond to a deadly virus have pushed catastrophic risks into the mainstream. While the likelihood of any given catastrophe is low, it is the enormous impact of the tail-risk that should concern us; preparing now will mean the difference between devastation and mere hardship.

We should look to create public commissions to investigate our preparedness for various catastrophic events, identify what can be done now for relatively small budgets with larger payoffs when a disaster comes, and then pass legislation that enshrines this knowledge institutionally in ways that do not rely on the whims and competence of whomever happens to be president. It is vital that any commissions include our preparedness for other challenges besides pandemics; preparedness for unexpected events is not selected through democratic pressures, and perhaps this has resulted in our current difficult situation with COVID-19. It would be wise to use this opportunity to prepare not just for the next viral outbreak, but for other unlikely events as well.

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The midterm elections are a month away, and while I have expressed my feelings on voting and the electoral system generally, I have also made several posts trying to boost specific policy ideas that should be more discussed. In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about which issues are top priority in this election, and whether any of them are actually as high impact as their popularity warrants.

The recent Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, which I think everyone agrees was pretty circus-like from start to finish regardless of political inclination, seems to have sparked more voter enthusiasm in the midterms. And while I’ll grant that Supreme Court nominations have grown in importance, it doesn’t follow that SCOTUS nominations should be a major issue in this election. The oldest justices are left-leaning, and so unlikely to retire in the next two years. Perhaps if there is a fear that Justices Ginsberg or Breyer (aged 85 and 80 respectively) will be forced into retirement due to medical problems, then this election would matter. But the chances of that seem less than 50%.

There are other issues, like immigration, that are highly impactful and also well discussed. If there was a decisive turnover from Republicans to Democrats in Congress, we’d expect some of that to be realized in immigration policy, but unfortunately not that much. Even if Democrats took both houses, this election is still largely being discussed in terms of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

This is a problem. Only one party can control the Presidency. Moreover, there are competing ideologies within parties, with many fiscal conservatives frustrated with George W. Bush, many neoconservatives frustrated with Trump, and yes, even some liberals frustrated with Obama on foreign policy. So really it should be said that only one ideology gets to control the White House as well. If the Presidency controls so much about policy, then this is disastrous for representative democracy. Depending on how ideological or political people are, the majority of people will not feel represented by the President, even if the President wins a majority of votes (something that has only happened 3 times in the last 8 presidential elections, going back 30 years).

The solution is clear, but we have no incentive to achieve it: Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. Its membership is large so as to draw from a wide range of views and geographical areas. When it acts, it must find compromises and alignments of interests, unlike the President which acts as a single unit. That was the design in the original constitution, and technically, if Congress worked to assert its control, it could retake such a position in government. However, congressmen have little incentive to do so; going on the record for votes and standing on specific principles is politically dangerous. Better instead to move questions of policy to the executive branch, and leave Congress to simply grandstand politically, never having to be tied down to specific votes.

For example: Barack Obama unilaterally decided to grant legal status and eligibility for federal benefits to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. I happen to think this was a good policy idea, but if the President can decide what laws to enforce and make his own laws with executive orders, then Congress is vestigial. President Trump actually took a pretty constitutional position and decided to end the DACA program and told Congress to pass the DREAM Act (would have crystallized the DACA program into law). He gave them six months, and they did not make the deadline, despite such action being pretty popular. This is unbelievable. Maybe too many people were playing politics. Maybe Donald Trump is incompetent in getting the legislation passed (he torpedoed a bipartisan bill), but that shouldn’t matter. Congress should be able to pass a bill that a majority of legislators agree with, but the will didn’t exist. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of the political divide of the Trump era, and so no bipartisanship could materialize, guaranteeing further partisanship in the future.

This cycle also delegitimizes Congress, making people look more often to the Presidency and to the courts. Congress is fundamentally tied to winning elections, so if people see Congress as unhelpful or unpopular, Senators and Representatives have even less incentive to do anything that might frustrate voters. That in turn also makes the courts increasingly important, which likely fuels additional democratic frustration, as the courts are still fairly removed from direct democratic influence. But if they are viewed as partisan extensions of the presidency, that just makes even more things rely on a single election where only a single ideology can win every four years.

I think there may be a way out of this mess if political parties made the midterms about Congressional vs Presidential Authority. It’s not always been true that Congress can only define itself in relation to the President, but it may be a useful way to couch constitutional authority in political terms. Reducing presidential power would be a concrete way to oppose Donald Trump, and perhaps even reach alleged small-government conservatives.

The Cato Institute lays out a platform for a resurgent Congress to run on: requiring votes on executive rule changes that will impose costs of $100 million on the economy (already introduced as the REINS Act), updating the Administrative Procedures Act to require courts to interpret administrative authority de novo or independent of the agency’s claimed interpretation (I’m horrified this isn’t already done), and require all fees and penalties collected by the government to be appropriated and spent by the Congress (right now, fees and profits are then spent by the collecting agency, with little oversight).

We don’t have to limit this approach to libertarian wishlist items. Kevin Kosar in Politico details additional approaches (and adds many more words in National Affairs), including an improvement to the robustness of congressional staffing; the executive has armies of bureaucrats working to provide the best information (and sometimes self-aggrandizing propaganda) to the branch (the Executive Office of the President alone includes some 4000 people). Congress has seen shrinking staffing for its oversight and accountability offices like the GAO. Congress should be the most powerful branch and so it should have access to the data and expert information on how best to oversee the actual implementation of policy the executive branch undertakes. Instead what we often have is Congressional staffers directly trying to research regulatory agencies, who are providing their own oversight information to non-expert politicians who often defer to the self-interested agencies. Kosar’s suggestion of a Congressional Regulation Office is also intriguing.

However, just because there is a way to do this, there is no reason to believe Democrats ever had an intention to follow this path during this midterm election. Nor does it mean Republicans will consider it in 2022 if the tables are reversed. Neither have an incentive to discuss constitutional authority when culture war issues are more likely to encourage their base to turn out. Understanding these public choice incentives doesn’t mean we have to live with them though. There is a nebulous role for real ideas in democracy, and it starts with having a discussion about the state of our politics.

Trump Junior and Russia

This weeks’ Fifth Column Podcast had an excellent discussion of Donald Trump Jr. and his attempt to get opposition research from the Russian government.

I have been pretty skeptical that the Trump administration and campaign actually did anything wrong with regard to Russia. I thought Trump was a poor candidate because he seemed very comfortable with authoritarians like Putin, which together with many positions he’s taken made me concerned about authoritarian policies he’d implement. Some of that concern has been well founded (e.g. appointing Jeff Sessions, removing an FBI Director he didn’t like), but in other places it has not. Trump seems to be bothered by criticism and a free press, but it’s clear the press is as robust and independent as ever.

I also thought Trump surrounded himself with really bad people, some of them with obvious terrible connections to the Russian government, like Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn (all of whom were fired). Again, this points to his friendliness with authoritarians and perhaps his incompetence with whom he surrounds himself with, not that he’s had contact with the Russian government itself.

I thought the intense media scrutiny over Russia wouldn’t provide anything, and it was dragging on for far too long. I thought the worst thing we would find would be that Trump fired FBI Director Comey for investigating his ties to Russia, not for any connections to Russia itself. But I was wrong. The New York Times reporting on this was so impressive that Donald Trump Jr., the target of the Times‘ article actually felt it would be better if he published these emails himself!

Thus, I’m literally typing these word for word from Trump Jr.’s twitter account. He got an email saying “…and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump”

Trump Jr’s response: “…if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer”.

I don’t know if this is illegal, as Trump Jr. has some amorphous relationship with the Trump campaign and allegedly isn’t involved in the administration at all, despite regularly going on TV to defend the administration. However, it’s at the very least unpatriotic and seems pretty unethical. If agents of a foreign government are reaching out to you to attack political opponents, your response should be to forward it to the FBI, not to set up a meeting as soon as possible. Trump was elected to “drain the swamp”. I thought that meant that many legislators are too close to special interests or are lobbied by large companies to pass favorable legislation. This is certainly problematic, but actively trying to get help from foreign governments to get into office seems at least as bad. Donald Trump Jr. is a swamp monster if ever there was such a thing.

Additionally, just like Hillary Clinton lied constantly about her email scandal (she didn’t have a private server; ok she did but there was nothing classified; ok it was classified but it was secure…), it turns out Trump Jr. and many other campaign members just straight up lied about having pursued Russian opposition research. Trump Jr. stated in a March interview that he had met people that were Russian but not meetings “…that were set up. None that I can think of at the moment. And certainly none that I was representing the campaign in any way, shape or form.” Here’s a full timeline, it’s pretty damning. This is the undermining of democracy that I thought Trump supporters claimed he was there to fight.

I wish all presidents were subjected to this sort of scrutiny. We had wall to wall media coverage for months with very few real stories until this week. The Obama administration crushed leakers and transparency, blocking FISA requests in an unprecedented manner. They brought government secrecy to a new level, while waging wars in several middle eastern countries without Congressional approval. Trump has only been in office for 6 months, and so it’s not hard to argue that the Obama administration was much worse in terms of doing illegal things, murdering civilians, spying on Americans and journalists, etc. Yet, media coverage has been much more aggressive on Trump (at least from the left, while the right-leaning media has often been at least as sycophantic as anything we saw under Obama on the left). I guess it’s better late than never, but the media needs to be far more adversarial in the future long after Trump is gone.

Leave a comment on the official reddit thread.

What is Postlibertarianism? v2.0

When I started blogging here about 18 months ago, I knew that I was having trouble identifying myself as exactly “libertarian”, despite that being my primary blogging perspective for years before that. I’ve mapped out important parts of this “new” position in previous posts, but now I think it would make sense to put everything in one place. This post is labeled “2.0” since former postlibertarian.com blogger Joshua Hedlund defined it pretty well in 2011. This is a more in depth analysis.
Continue reading What is Postlibertarianism? v2.0

2017 Predictions

It’s fun to have opinions, and it’s easy to craft a narrative to fit your beliefs. But it’s especially dangerous to look back at events and place them retroactively into your model of the world. You can’t learn anything if you’re only ever looking for evidence that supports you. However, if you try to use your model of the world to create testable predictions, those predictions can be proven right or wrong, and you can actually learn something. Incorrect predictions can help update our models.

This is, of course, the basis for the scientific method, and generally increasing our understanding of the world. Making predictions is also important for making us more humble; we don’t know everything and so putting our beliefs to the test requires us to reduce our certainty until we’ve researched a subject before making baseless claims. Confidence levels are an important part of predictions, as they force us to think in the context of value and betting: a 90% confidence level means I would take a $100 bet that required me to put up anything less that $90. Moreover, it’s not just a good idea to make predictions to help increase your knowledge; people who have opinions but refuse to predict things with accompanying confidence levels, and therefore refuse to subject their theories to scrutiny and testability, must be classified as more fraudulent and intellectually dishonest.

First let’s take a look at how I did this past year, and see if my calibration levels were correct. Incorrect predictions are crossed out.

Postlibertarian Specific

Postlibertarian to have >10 additional posts by July 1, 2016: 70%
~~Postlibertarian Twitter to have more than 240 followers: 70%~~
Postlibertarian.com to have >10k page loads in 2016: 50% (had 30k according to StatCounter)
The predictions on this page will end up being underconfident: 60%

World Events

Liberland will be recognized by <5 UN members: 99% (recognized by 0)
Free State Project to reach goal of 20,000 people in 2016: 50% (occurred February 3rd)
ISIS to still exist: 80%
ISIS to kill < 100 Americans 2016: 80% (I think <100 were killed by any terrorists, fewer in combat)
US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 80%
No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 80% (50 did die in the Orlando shooting unfortunately)
~~Donald Trump will not be Republican Nominee:~~ 80% (whoops)
Hillary Clinton to be Democratic nominee: 90%
Republicans to hold Senate: 60%
Republicans to hold House: 80%
Republicans to win Presidential Election: 50% (I predicted in December, Nate Silver had Trump at 35% the day of, who’s a genius now??)
I will vote for the Libertarian Presidential Candidate: 70% *
S&P 500 level end of year < 2500: 70%
Unemployment rate December 2016 < 6% : 70%
~~WTI Crude Oil price < $50 :~~ 80%
Price of Bitcoin > $500: 60%
Price of Bitcoin < $1000: 80%
Sentient General AI will not be created this year: 99%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
~~I will not be able to rent trips on self-driving cars from Uber/ Lyft:~~ 90% **
Humans will not land on moon by end of 2016: 95%
Edward Snowden will not be pardoned by end of Obama Administration: 80% ***

*I didn’t personally vote for the libertarian candidate, but I did trade my vote, resulting in Gary Johnson getting two votes more than he would have had I not voted at all. I’m counting this as at least a vote for Johnson.

**Technically, I am not particularly able to get a ride on a self-driving Uber because I don’t live in Pittsburgh, but I don’t think that’s what I meant. I also didn’t expect any self-driving Uber rides to be available anywhere, so I’m counting it against me.

***Obama still has a few weeks to pardon Snowden, but it’s not looking good

So let’s take a look at how I did by category:

Of items I marked as 50% confident, 3 were right and 0 were wrong.
Of items I marked as 60% confident, 3 were right and 0 were wrong.
Of items I marked as 70% confident, 4 were right and 1 was wrong.
Of items I marked as 80% confident, 7 were right and 2 were wrong.
Of items I marked as 90% confident, 1 was right and 1 was wrong.
Of items I marked as 95% confident, 1 was right and 0 were wrong.
Of items I marked as 99% confident, 3 were right and 0 were wrong.

As you can see from this data graphed, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to predictions.

You’re supposed to be as close to the perfect calibration line as possible. The big problems are that I only had 2 or 3 predictions for the 50%, 60%, and 90% confidence intervals. For example, my slip-up on predicting Uber wouldn’t have self-driving cars this year means I was only 1 for 2 on 90% predictions. Clearly I need to find more things to predict, as I had 5 and 9 predictions for the 70% and 80% confidence levels, which were right about on the mark. Luckily for next year, I have almost double the number of predictions:

Predictions for 2017:

World Events

Trump Approval Rating end of June <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
Trump Approval Rating end of year <50% (Reuters or Gallup): 80%
Trump Approval Rating end of year <45% (Reuters or Gallup): 60%
Trump 2017 Average Approval Rating (Gallup) <50%: 70%
ISIS to still exist as a fighting force in Palmyra, Mosul, or Al-Raqqah: 60%
ISIS to kill < 100 Americans: 80%
US will not get involved in any new major war with death toll of > 100 US soldiers: 60%
No terrorist attack in the USA will kill > 100 people: 90%
France will not vote to leave to the EU: 80%
The UK will trigger Article 50 this year: 70%
The UK will not fully leave the EU this year: 99%
No country will leave the Euro (adopt another currency as their national currency): 80%
S&P 500 2016 >10% growth: 60%
S&P 500 will be between 2000 and 2850: 80% (80% confidence interval)
Unemployment rate December 2017 < 6% : 70%
WTI Crude Oil price > $60 : 70%
Price of Bitcoin > $750: 60%
Price of Bitcoin < $1000: 50%
Price of Bitcoin < $2000: 80%
There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $1B: 80%
There will not be another cryptocurrency with market cap above $500M: 50%
Sentient General AI will not be created this year: 99%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year for general purchase: 90%
Self-driving cars will not be available this year to purchase / legally operate for < $100k: 99%
I will not be able to buy trips on self-driving cars from Uber/Lyft in a location I am living: 80%
I will not be able to buy a trip on a self-driving car from Uber/Lyft without a backup employee in the car anywhere in the US: 90%
Humans will not land on moon by end of 2017: 95%
SpaceX will bring humans to low earth orbit: 50%
SpaceX successfully launches a reused rocket: 60%
No SpaceX rockets explode without launching their payload to orbit: 60%
Actual wall on Mexican border not built: 99%
Some increased spending on immigration through expanding CBP, ICE, or the border fence: 80%
Corporate Tax Rate will be cut to 20% or below: 50%
Obamacare (at least mandate, community pricing, pre-existing conditions) not reversed: 80%
Budget deficit will increase: 90%
Increase in spending or action on Drug War (e.g. raiding marijuana dispensaries, increased spending on DEA, etc): 70%
Some tariffs raised: 90%
The US will not significantly change its relationship to NAFTA: 60%
Federal government institutes some interference with state level legal marijuana: 60%
At least one instance where the executive branch violates a citable civil liberties court case: 70%
Trump administration does not file a lawsuit against any news organization for defamation: 60%
Trump not impeached (also no Trump resignation): 95%

Postlibertarian

Postlibertarian.com to have >15 more blog posts by July 1, 2017: 80%
Postlibertarian.com to have >30 blog posts by end of year: 70%
Postlibertarian.com to have fewer hits than last year (no election): 60%
Postlibertarian Twitter account to have <300 followers: 90%
Postlibertarian Twitter account to have >270 followers: 60%
Postlibertarian Subreddit to have <100 subscribers: 90%

Leave a comment on this post’s reddit thread.

Against Trump

In my last post, I made the case for why voting for a main party was far more likely to be a wasted vote than a vote for third party. I made this argument on the basis of the presidential voting system itself, regardless of any voter’s actual policy preferences.

Nonetheless, if you think Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump have the best policies or ideology, at best my argument should make you indifferent between voting for one of those candidates or leaving it blank (I advocated that one should still vote because of the often overlooked importance of local elections). If you prefer Donald Trump, this post will be my argument for why you shouldn’t. This is not an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and I hope to write a post against her candidacy next. But there is a third option. I’ve already laid out the case for why it is more practical to vote for a third party rather than waste your vote on the Democrats and Republicans, but this post will show why you should prefer Gary Johnson’s moderate-limited-government-libertarianism to Trump.

Trump: The Troll

The most basic foundation of Trump’s appeal is his fervent opposition to the cultural left, especially the social justice movement and political correctness. In some sense, it doesn’t matter what he says; because he has said ridiculous and outrageous things, he has provided a “safe space” for people who can’t stand the recent domination, real or perceived, of left-wing outrage politics. The cultural left has created a tough situation for their opponents: if you don’t agree with them, they label you as a misogynist, fascist, and white supremacist. The alt-right was a fairly typical human response: they took the insults as a badge of honor.

Installed-Left: "Everything that resists us is disguised white supremacism."
Alt-Right: "Okay."
Installed-Left: "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING!!!"

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) August 25, 2016

So what has the left done about Donald Trump? A pretty common response (New York Times, Huffington Post, Vox) is to call him racist! Take a look at these accusations from that Huffington Post article:

He attacked Muslim Gold Star parents Khizr Khan and Ghazala Khan. His attack didn’t address their criticism, but suggested Mrs. Khan didn’t speak because of her religion.
The Justice Department sued his company in 1973 for not renting to black applicants, and there are stories from employees alleging that he was racist
He didn’t condemn David Duke’s support until the next day
He questions whether Obama was born in the US
He tweeted a picture of him eating a taco bowl to show he loves Hispanics
He condoned the attack by his supporters of a Black Lives Matter heckler at a campaign event
He claimed Judge Gonzalo Curiel was biased because of his Mexican heritage (Curiel was born in Boston).

These are all awful, insensitive, and moronic actions, but calling them racist or Trump a racist for doing them tries to equate Trump to the level of the KKK. If Trump is fundamentally appealing because he doesn’t back down from outrage tactics, and his supporters are tired of the left screaming that every deviation from progressive orthodoxy is white supremacy, then calling Trump racist is the worst thing you can do. And honestly on many of these issues, Trump is professionally trolling, going just over the line on what is acceptable to draw the outrage.

For example, Trump says he responded to the Khans because they criticized him first, which is true. His response was characterized by an attack on Ghazala Khan and an assumption about her actions due to her faith. This isn’t directly saying that Muslims are inferior, even though there is an implication. But if we just call this out as being “racist”, we really lose out on our argument demonstrating just how awful this episode was for Trump. In fact, Trump supporters can point out that many Islamic countries treat their women poorly and so this is worth questioning. By doing this, we let Trump deflect just how abysmally he managed that political catastrophe; instead, we should be discussing that Trump had no actual response to Khan’s accusations of his unconstitutional policies, and instead had to resort to unfounded assumptions and speculation. He would rather make up things about a family whose son died serving this country because he felt insulted than suck it up and avoid any more fallout. The sheer political incompetence is unspeakable, and the unconstitutionality of many of Trump’s policies remain unanswered.

Many other examples I listed also let Trump get away with absurd positions by jumping immediately to racism. His run-in with the Justice Department is important, but was also over 40 years ago. Was it his fault or his company’s, and does he still have those opinions? The idea of a government agency forcing him into a settlement on allegations of racism is also exactly the conspiracy narrative Trump wants. It seems likely he knows who David Duke is, but I’ve continually overestimated Trump’s abilities in other areas. And just having terrible people endorse you doesn’t automatically make you a bad person too. Trump likely supported the story Obama was born in Kenya because Obama’s father was originally a Kenyan national. It seems pretty easy for Trump supporters to argue he would have demanded a birth certificate of any person whose parentage was outside the US. Calling this racist really lets Trump change the subject to how PC culture is bad, when really we should be focusing on how much of an idiot you have to be to waste so much political capital on a conspiracy theory that was obviously wrong. There were plenty of grounds to criticize Obama’s policies, yet Trump decided to focus on discrediting his legitimacy through a conspiracy theory rather than actual ideas.

Calling it racist when Trump condoned an attack on a protester at his event is sort of the epitome of political correctness gone wrong: it implies that as long he condones violence against protesters of all races at his campaign events, it’s ok. The problem is not the race of the victim, the problem is that he’s condoning violence against people who disagree with him. His statement against Judge Gonzalo Curiel is almost blatantly racist, as even Paul Ryan states, yet Trump could have easily cited Sonia Sotomayer’s “wise Latina” quote as evidence for why he believed a judge’s ethnicity could influence their opinions. If we get outraged about this, we fuel the perception that social justice not only has a monopoly on outrage politics, but that when the exact ideas that are promoted by the left are used by the right/conservatives/whatever-Trump-supporters-are, only they are attacked. It seems to be targeting of tribes, not even of ideas.

And that’s the point. Trump engages in a motte-and-bailey doctrine where he says things that obviously imply bigotry or outright harming non-Americans, but then if you call him on it, he deflects or calls it a joke. This is an annoying tribalistic tactic (often employed by social justice warriors and also Ann Coulter) where a group will make a ridiculous claim, but really support a weaker version of that claim (see part IV here). As Scott Alexander says, social justice warriors seem to imply ridiculous things like “men can’t be part of a discussion on gender”, but when challenged, they state more defensible positions like “men shouldn’t interject into safe spaces for women”. Trump says some Mexicans coming over the border are rapists, with the implication being that the average illegal immigrant is a violent criminal. But if you call him on it, he’ll say that he also said “many of them are good people!” which is technically true. He also didn’t say 2nd amendment supporters should shoot Hillary Clinton, but he left it open.

Trump is in part successful (and especially appealing to the alt-right) because he meets social justice warriors with their own methods, and it’s hard to pin him down on anything because his entire presidential run is a giant troll. Of course, I really dislike many of the tactics of the social justice movement and the outrage tactics of internet culture wars. I’ve gone on the record about why I think their ideas and methods are bad. I understand the appeal of fighting fire with fire. But it won’t solve our problems. All of the criticisms aimed at the social justice movement still apply to Trump. We should be trying to elevate our society and discussions, not give in to the temptation to debase them. Collectivism is evil in all its forms, left-wing, right-wing, and bi-partisan.

Many Trump supporters have bought into his campaign as the only way to fight the social justice left. They are wrong on many levels; trolling can’t beat trolling, flip-flopping and incompetence can’t beat Hillary’s political machine, protectionism can’t beat markets, and nationalism and authoritarianism can’t beat freedom. In fact, by allowing Hillary Clinton, one of the weakest presidential candidates in recent history, to continue to dominate this election, Trump has handed the left one of their biggest political victories and squelched one of the biggest opportunities for American conservatives.

And Trump is not the only way to fight back against the worst methods and ideas of blue tribalism. One can oppose collectivism without sacrificing principles or lowering the level of dialogue. As I go through the following deep flaws that Trump has, keep in mind that Gary Johnson has none of them.

The Unknown

What does Trump actually believe? It’s almost impossible to know. These are just the positions I could find so far. I don’t think this list is comprehensive, but I want it recorded somewhere. Many of these are from this ABC news post, this CNN article, and this extensive NBC news article if they’re not otherwise cited.

He used to think pretty highly of Hillary Clinton and even invited the Clintons to his wedding, and now apparently thinks they are terrible.
Trump declared that he thought Obama was the founder of ISIS, and when pressed on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, he doubled down. Then after a full day of focusing on this point, he abruptly tweeted that it was sarcasm.
Trump was going to self-fund his campaign and not fund raise. But he’s gone back on that promise and is now taking money from whomever will give it to him. He was so short on money, he hadn’t even bought TV ads until the last week of August.
Trump started out ok with taking Syrian refugees, and then reversed his position and now wants to send them back.
Trump initially stated that Japan and South Korea should defend themselves, including with nuclear weapons. Now he says that’s preposterous and he never said that. How do you suffer amnesia about advocating the biggest change in US nuclear policy in history?
Trump has relentlessly hammered Clinton for supporting the Iraq War in 2003. It turns out in 2002, he backed the Iraq War too. Also, when asked about Mike Pence’s support of the war, he said it didn’t matter to him. But it still matters that Clinton backed it.
Trump made headlines stating he wanted to be a “neutral guy” in the Israel-Palestine conference (a big change from US policy which has held a strong alliance with Israel), and then said Israel was being treated like a second-class citizen later on.
Trump has also called the Libyan intervention a total disaster, but he in fact backed this intervention as well. When shown a video of his previous support, he acknowledges it and says he only wanted a “surgical” strike.
Trump was originally pro-choice and is now pro-life and even advocated that there should be “punishment” for women who get abortions. Admittedly in that interview, Chris Matthews did a good job of cornering Trump and not letting him get away with dodging the question, so maybe Trump doesn’t actually believe that. But that’s my point: we have no idea what this guy is going to do.
Trump advocated the use of torture especially against ISIS and suspected terrorists. When dozens of military advisers pointed out he would effectively be telling people to commit illegal acts, he stated “if I say do it, they’re gonna do it.” The next day Trump said he would be bound by laws just like any president, and then proceeded to call for waterboarding and torture in subsequent speeches.
Like abortion, Trump used to have a very different view on gun laws and actually supported an assault weapons ban. Now he’s a strong 2nd amendment supporter. Except in classrooms. Unless it’s a teacher in a classroom. What?
Trump was against raising the minimum wage, then for it, then said he wanted to leave it to the states, now says it should be over $10 and left to the states.
Trump has been for a single-payer system in the past and has praised Canada’s and Scotland’s system. But he hates Obamacare. But maybe he still likes the mandate. But he doesn’t know what he’d replace it with. His current website’s plan is a pretty good free market approach, but what would he actually pursue?
Trump was going to increase taxes on the rich, then said he would cut everyone’s taxes by huge amounts in an online proposal (that this blog looked at), then reduced the amount he would cut, and now it’s a pretty standard small income tax cut with an additional tax break for childcare
Trump seems to have called for a renegotiating of U.S. public debt similar to a debt restructuring for an insolvent firm. He seemed to have no idea that U.S. treasuries are so cheap to borrow with because they are never defaulted on. He even indicated that the U.S. can always print more money. Then he seemed to walk it back and say he wouldn’t renegotiate the American debt.
Last December Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” In May, this changed to a “suggestion”. Then he added the idea of banning people from places with a “history of terrorism”, then added there would be “extreme vetting” (so not an outright ban?). Trump and his people also added that there had been “no change” in their policy since December.
Trump has stated that he would deport 11 million people currently residing in the US illegally. This is significantly larger than the current population of New York City. Then he said he would deport them all, but bring back the “good ones” legally. Buzzfeed even reported that Trump stated off-the-record that deporting all 11 million is just a starting point for negotiations. Just a couple week’s ago, Trump seemed to abandon deportations altogether. Now it seems they are in full force again.

I should also note that Trump said he would call Bill Gates and get him to shut down the internet if need be. I didn’t list that here because I don’t think he ever repudiated that position so it’s not a “flip-flop”. Trump also suggested Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Even on Trump’s most common talking point, his “wall” on the border with Mexico is obviously not true because, as John Oliver points out, it will cost far more than Trump says it will, and there is no way we can force Mexico to pay for it. Adding a tariff on Mexican imports does not force Mexico to pay for anything, it forces American consumers to fund the wall.

This is related to questions of Trump’s temperament; it appears that on many of these interviews, Trump has either never thought about the issue presented to him, lied about his position last time so he can’t remember what his position was, or just honestly changes his position because he’s not smart enough to have foreseen the objection, but wants to appear knowledgeable and so says that was his position the whole time. The bottom line is that on virtually every issue, even the core issues he’s maintained, we have no idea what he will do. On top of all this, Trump is capricious and easily offended. He has consistently filed lawsuits against press organizations that have criticized him, regardless of their ineffectiveness and potential attack on free speech. Do we want someone who has no principles, who has no idea where he stands on issues, and can be easily manipulated by his political enemies (“I don’t have thin skin”) to be in charge of our country’s national defense? The Supreme Court is an important issue in this election, but what makes us think we can trust Trump to actually pick from among the names he has mentioned before when he has changed his mind on everything else?

On many issues, he has taken positions not just worse than Gary Johnson or Hillary Clinton, but positions worse than any president in history. Will these be the positions he takes or will they change? Will any of his positions that sound reasonable stick around once he is president? We don’t know.

The Incompetence

Trump has a record of questionable business acumen as well as straight-up fraud. He certainly has done well in the real estate market, but in other ventures he’s been mostly a flop. He has also widely exaggerated his net worth by constantly trying to tout his own brand. And, by admission of its own employees, Trump University had no interest in teaching any of its customers, only in selling them the most expensive seminars it could.

His political campaign has also been questionable. We will get to policy in the next section, but for now let’s just talk about Trump’s job as a politician, which is to get people to vote for you. As I noted in May, Trump was one of the worst candidates the Republicans have had as far as political appeal. He won the Republican presidential primary with only 45% of the vote. By itself, a number that low isn’t unprecedented, but when combined with the fact that most of his primary opponents have decided against endorsing him, he was one of the least liked Republican candidates among Republicans in recent memory. He’s also only averaged above 40% in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average and above 44% in RealClearPolitics’ average for a couple weeks in July. He has never really pivoted to the general electorate. Trump has had several changes in his campaign management due to apparent incompetence. He will be the first presidential candidate since Nixon to not release his tax returns, and he has just started airing TV ads. That’s correct, Gary Johnson was outspending Trump on TV time until September.

Trump’s response to his abysmal appeal has been to suggest that all polls that don’t show him winning are rigged. In fact, Politico even published a column entitled “What if Trump doesn’t accept defeat?” As already mentioned in this piece, he got into a very public spat with the parents of a Gold Star soldier who had given his life in 2004. He also said that “there must be some form of punishment” for women who get abortions, and then Ben Carson said that Trump wasn’t expecting that question. Trump wasn’t prepared for a question about abortion in a political event while running for President? You cannot be serious.

What is Trump’s plan in office when foreign heads of state ask him obvious questions he should know the answer to? What is he going to do when people don’t automatically like what he has to say? He has failed in essentially every venture that wasn’t real estate or a reality TV show. The inability to make changes for a better long-term strategy combined with the need to retaliate over every perceived insult disqualify Trump from being Commander-in-Chief.

The Policy

As I’ve stated, it’s hard to nail down what Trump believes on anything. It often appears like he has never thought about policies or the implications of policies until objections are brought up to him.

One aspect that had been central to Trump was a hardline stance on immigration and deporting illegal immigrants. As of a couple weeks ago, he appears to have flipped on that and now flipped back, but his website still has language that appears to indicate serious criminal charges for anyone living here illegally. Even if Trump has become less focused on deportations, his immigration policy comes with absolutely massive costs, both fiscal and legal. As noted by John Oliver, his “wall” on the Mexican border will likely cost several times as much as he’s claimed, not to mention the hidden costs of wasting construction time and resources on building a concrete wall literally in the middle of nowhere. If this project ever does happen (which it won’t), it will cause the cost of construction and related services to go up as resources are pulled into a giant wasteful wall. Moreover, as Trump’s website acknowledges, most illegal immigrants don’t sneak over the border; they cross with legal visas and overstay them, and so this wall will do almost nothing to stop illegal immigration.

There are also effects on American citizens as well who are forced to deal with questionably constitutional Border Patrol stops where people are pulled over with no reasonable suspicion or probable cause. Trump has also focused on crime caused by illegal immigrants, despite the fact that crime rates are much lower among this segment of the population than among American citizens. Terrorism, as noted by this blog, is so unlikely that the threat of terrorism via immigration is not even worth addressing.

Moreover, there is a self-evident free market argument for immigration; if the economy would work more efficiently without immigrants, they wouldn’t be coming. Specifically in the United States, immigration helps to expand our workforce while European economies shudder under high levels of retirees and low birthrates. The OECD has also found that because immigrants come to work, they are productive enough to pay more in taxes than benefits they get out. Trump’s arguments for making H1-B visas harder to give out and more expensive just creates an incentive to ship jobs overseas rather than keep them here. Overall, it seems better for Americans (and likely the global economy) to keep immigrants coming here than to ship the jobs overseas.

There is certainly an argument that we haven’t seen this level of immigration in the United States in a while, even on a percentage scale. Immigrants now make up 13% of the population, but that’s still less than was common during the late 19th century. There’s also the true point that most immigration prior to the ending of national origin quotas in 1965 was from Europe. Yet, since this is essentially a cultural and not an economic argument, at best this still argues that we should have open immigration–just from some countries and not others. It also doesn’t offer resistance to other forms of open immigration, such as for advanced degree holders (especially graduates of American universities).

We also have to acknowledge that there really are serious obstacles for potential immigrants right now…which has only resulted in illegal immigration. Trump acknowledges the economic burden of an over-regulated economy, but then proposes tons of new regulations on immigration. Using the state to pick winners and losers in the economy is a dangerous thing to do.

Trade is the other area Trump has been most outspoken on. Here, unlike immigration, there is no cultural argument, there is only economics. And it’s clear that when it comes to trade economics, Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. He would add tariffs to goods, making them more expensive for average Americans and cutting into middle-class purchasing power. He would start trade wars with China, and attempt to reverse foreign governments subsidizing their own exports which directly deposits foreign tax revenues into the pockets of American consumers. The protectionism he advocates is essentially an argument for the global economy to leave the US behind and to ensure that new technology and innovation is happening elsewhere while our economy stagnates and our lack of dynamism and competition gets even worse.

Why is Trump suggesting this? Bryan Caplan points out in The Myth of the Rational Voter that voters are subject to many biases, most of which you can find in Trump’s policies. This includes, among others, an anti-market bias and an anti-foreign bias, where voters tend to underestimate the benefits of market systems as well as underestimate the benefits of interacting with foreigners. But despite these biases, free trade is immensely good for the economy. Tariffs being some of the most regressive taxes we have, freer trade is also a big tax break for poor Americans relative to the rich. Trade, along with immigration, is one of the best areas in which American policy can directly improve the world.

The Authoritarianism

Let’s take a quick history detour: in 1972, five men were arrested for breaking into the DNC’s Headquarters in the Watergate Complex. They had been sent by the Nixon reelection committee, and the Nixon administration immediately sought to cover up their involvement. Nixon actually ordered the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation into the burglary, claiming national security issues. The administration hoped that would prevent any further prying, but as more details came out, a Senate select committee was established in February 1973 to investigate a possible cover-up, and a special independent investigator was appointed by the attorney general.

When a Senate hearing uncovered that there were tapes of all Oval Office conversations, the Senate and special prosecutor subpoenaed the tapes, which Nixon refused to turn over, citing executive privilege. When the prosecutor persisted, Nixon actually ordered the attorney general to fire him, and the attorney general resigned in protest. Solicitor General Robert Bork eventually complied, but under political pressure, Nixon appointed a new special prosecutor. Edited transcripts were released in early 1974, which showed Nixon in a poor light, although they did not fully incriminate him. The new special prosecutor subpoenaed specific tapes which Nixon again refused to turn over. The case went to the Supreme Court which ruled unanimously that Nixon had no unqualified privilege of immunity from investigation, and that he had to turn over the tapes. Nixon did. They revealed clear wrongdoing on his part, and the House Judiciary committee recommended impeachment on several counts. Knowing he would soon be impeached and likely removed by the Senate, Nixon resigned.

There was a backlash against the office of the presidency after Nixon, but we have fully reversed that trend today. The Bush and Obama administrations have undertaken naked power grabs that have helped create an imperial presidency beyond anything Nixon ever dreamed of. Many libertarians have been warning about these massive power expansions for years. Now in the face of the Trump administration, we’ve created all the tools a tyrant would need to run amok.

As Conor Friedersdorf notes in The Atlantic:

The president can order American citizens killed in secret.

The president can detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trial.

The president can order drone strikes at will in countries against which no war has been declared.

The president can start a torture program with impunity.

The president can conduct warrantless surveillance on tens of millions of Americans.

To that I would also add that if deemed a troublemaker, the government has plenty of options to attack you without disappearing you. We know at least the DEA and IRS have used NSA information gained through mass surveillance of Americans, and then obscured this source by finding another stated reason to stop a suspect. The enormous amount of statutes on the books means it’s almost certain average people break laws every single day, and so these law enforcement agencies can always find probable cause to arrest you. Then they can stack up charges to force a plea deal, all at the discretion of prosecutors. As it stands right now, there’s a strong case that the criminal justice system is biased, slow, and unfair, and that it deprives individuals of their rights. But now imagine Trump in charge of the DEA, FBI, intelligence services, and the military.

Trump administration could be even worse than Nixon; given Trump’s continual flip-flopping, his trolling, his total unpreparedness for obvious challenges, and his terrible policy ideas, we don’t actually know if Trump understands how government works. Many of his fantastical policy ideas on his website go beyond the usual politicians’ wishlists; it’s unclear whether he would even try to sell his agenda to Congress, or just try to implement it with executive authority, or indeed if he would understand the difference.

For example, nestled in his immigration policy is a call to end birthright citizenship. Does Trump acknowledge what that would require? As Rand Paul has noted, the 1898 case US v Wong Kim Ark declared that children of legal immigrants were automatically citizens. It seems that Trump wants to overturn this case, which would require a constitutional amendment. It’s possible Trump wants only to stop birthright citizenship of illegal immigrants (he keeps changing his positions on everything), but does he want to do this with a law, or a legal battle? Does he realize that the president can’t pass laws unilaterally? It’s also worth wondering what Trump believes he can actually do on abortion. We’ve already discussed his bewildering stance that women should be punished for getting an abortion, a position basically no one else has ever advocated for. But does he realize that he would need to pass a constitutional amendment to achieve that goal?

Another example, he declared on a debate stage that if he told the military to commit war crimes they would do it. That’s not only against US law, that’s against international law. If he thinks that he can do things as president that are already illegal, what makes us think he would be waiting for Congress to do anything? How about shutting down parts of the internet? In Trump’s own words: “Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.” How about banning people based on their religion? Do we think Trump will wait for Congressional approval of obviously unconstitutional ideas? Or will he just order that they be done without thinking, just like everything else in his campaign?

The ACLU has released a 27 page memo on things Trump has said that are blatantly unconstitutional. It makes an excellent legal case against Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country as well as his mass deportation of illegal immigrants. The magnitude of individual rights violations from deportations specifically would be staggering, as there is no way to arrest millions of immigrants without also arresting regular American citizens and legal residents as there is no way to tell them apart. Arrests would have to be done without probable cause and largely based on racial profiling with likely hundreds of thousands of law abiding people caught up in the dragnet. The police state necessary to accomplish such an action is likely beyond even the secret police organizations of former communist nations.

The ACLU memo also makes an important point concerning Trump’s promise to “open up the libel laws”: there are no federal libel statutes. What exactly Trump would do were he to be president and then find out that there are only state libel laws, I have no clue. But imagine the powers of the Justice Department in the hands of someone who has a history of abusing eminent domain and using the power of the justice system to silence critics. He has already blacklisted media outlets he doesn’t like and banned them from his campaign events. As Damon Root of Reason notes: “Just like a crybaby advocate of political correctness, Trump wants to hollow out the First Amendment in order to make a ‘safe space’ for himself.”

It’s not hard to see the abuses of the Nixon administration repeated under a hypothetical Trump one. But in 1974, when Nixon lost his appeal to the Supreme Court, he still turned over the tapes. I don’t know if we realize how vulnerable our constitution was in this moment. Constitutional power is not something physical; as Abraham Lincoln proved, the Supreme Court has no enforcement arm. In retrospect, if Nixon had just wanted to maximize his political power, it seems that his best plan would have been to not release the tapes and accept whatever political fallout that was. Maybe he would have been forced to resign, maybe not, but he only risked being in the same situation that actually happened. Trump has arguably already promised to do more unconstitutional things than Nixon ever did, and he’s less popular than Nixon ever was before Watergate. If in a similar situation, would Trump comply with the Supreme Court? With Congress? He’s already calling the election rigged before it’s even happened, and he doesn’t seem to believe polls that report him far behind Clinton (which he is). If he found himself thwarted by the other branches of government, would Trump allow the rule of law to occur, or subvert it using his executive authority? Would he even care that his actions were unpopular given how unpopular he already is?

Most of the problems in this section also apply to Hillary Clinton, and it is likely she would continue to abuse government power just like the Bush and Obama administrations. But while Trump may be running against Hillary, I’ve already made the case that your only decision in voting is whether to waste your vote on a main party, or help get a third party better ballot access. Gary Johnson specifically has been an outspoken critic of the advances of government power and the growing authoritarianism centralized in the presidency. If you want to stand against the increasing authoritarianism of the federal government, there is no way to justify voting for Trump over Gary Johnson.

Trump has many problems as a candidate: he is inconsistent, incompetent, and he reduces our ability to have real discussions. His policies are bad, but his authoritarian threats should give us the greatest pause. Would you vote for Richard Nixon today if Nixon told you he was going to abuse executive authority to preserver his own power? If he continuously attacked free speech and criticism, if he promised to arrest millions of people living in the US, do you think voting for him would be a good idea? Well, it’s not a hypothetical, all of these policies are literal quotations from Trump himself. You shouldn’t vote for Nixon, and you shouldn’t vote for Trump.

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Picture credit: Gage Skidmore, modified by postlibertarian.com (grayscale), licensed under BY-SA-2.0.

The Electoral College: Why You Should Vote Third Party

Voting Power

Robin Hanson proposes a voting thought experiment:

Imagine that polls stayed open for a month before the election deadline, and that a random one percent of voters were upgraded to “super-voters,” who can privately vote up to twenty times, as long as they wait at least an hour between votes. When a super-voter votes all twenty times, their votes are doubled, and counted as forty votes. “Privately” means no one else ever knows that this person was a super-voter.

Having two votes is twice the power of a normal vote, and gives you twice the ability to choose a winner. In this scenario, if super-voters wanted to maximize their ability to change the outcome they would unquestionably vote twenty times. Yet Hanson suggests most people wouldn’t vote twenty times. I would suggest another way to imagine the thought experiment: given the ability to pay to be part of this one percent, how much would you pay to be a super voter? I’d bet the price would incredibly low. Why? Because even these “super-voters” have no ability to influence the outcome of elections.

At least for federal elections. In 2012, the closest state in the presidential election by percentage was Florida with Obama ahead by only 0.88% (Click on % or votes to sort respectively).

State	Obama Victory Margin (%)	Obama Victory Margin (votes)	Electoral Votes
Colorado	5.36	137,858	9
Florida	0.88	74,309	29
Georgia	-7.82	-304,861	16
Maine, 2nd	8.56	28,783	1
Montana	-13.65	-66,089	3
Nebraska, 1st	-16.64	-43,939	1
Nebraska, 2nd	-7.17	-19,087	1
Nevada	6.68	57,806	6
New Hampshire	5.58	39,643	4
North Carolina	-2.04	-92,004	15
Ohio	2.98	166,277	18
Virginia	3.88	149,298	13

Several states or districts were actually closer in absolute victory margin than Florida, but not in percentage. Suppose that Romney had won Florida instead of Obama. This would have required an additional 74,000 people to vote for Romney or 74,000 Obama supporters to stay home, or half that number to switch from Obama to Romney. This isn’t out of the realm of possibility, but your puny 40 votes from Robin Hanson’s thought experiment would be worthless. Even if you could get Hanson to give you 74,310 votes instead of 40, all it would do would change Romney’s electoral votes total from 206 to 235, not nearly enough to win the presidency.

In fact, if you could strategically place votes, the least amount of votes you’d need to add to flip the outcome from Obama to Romney would be:

74,310 votes in Florida for 29 electoral votes
166,278 votes in Ohio for 18 electoral votes
149,299 votes in Virginia for 13 electoral votes
39,644 votes in New Hampshire for 4 electoral votes

That would get Romney to 270 electoral votes, winning 4 states by a single vote each, and requiring 429,531 votes in exactly the right places. So how much should you pay to get 40 votes in the 2012 election? $0, because 40 votes could literally do nothing to change the outcome.

Where Votes Matter

Needless to say, your single vote in a single state is even less valuable than 40 votes. There are some mitigating circumstances which would give your federal vote the chance at importance: you don’t know how close the election will be in your state and you don’t know which state will be the decisive one. But even this is only somewhat true; even though the 2016 election is months away, we are pretty sure that the most important states are Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and North Carolina. FiveThirtyEight does this by ordering all states on a scale of most likely to least likely to vote for a candidate; the state that pushes each candidate over 270 electoral votes is the decisive state. New Hampshire and Nevada are located near the others, but because they are worth fewer votes, they are not as likely to decide the election.

The problem for Romney in 2012 was that Florida was the closest state, yet his “tipping point” state was probably Colorado (or New Hampshire like we calculated earlier). People in Colorado actually had the decisive votes, yet their state was not competitive, so the election was largely over weeks before it actually happened.

This year, although there is still time, Trump is not competitive because he is losing badly in all the states mentioned above; he’s currently behind in not just Virginia and New Hampshire, but Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Iowa, and even Georgia. If Trump is in danger of losing Arizona even a few weeks before election day (recent polls have him ahead by only 2 percentage points), then the election will be over early.

Of course, things will change, and I suspect Trump will begin to lead again in North Carolina and Georgia. But to have a chance to be president, he’ll have to be competitive in Florida, Ohio, and likely Pennsylvania. If he’s not, he’ll end up like Romney with most votes cast on election day just fulfilling an already known outcome.

But irrespective of Trump’s competitiveness and barring unprecedented circumstances, if you don’t live in those mentioned states, your vote will be worthless regardless of what happens between now and election day. That’s an impressive fact. The purpose of the electoral college was to add a layer of indirection between pure populism and the presidency, but all it has succeeded in doing in make some states matter and others not matter at all.

Should You Vote At All?

There’s no getting around this question given how useless your vote is. The bottom line is that when it comes to presidential elections and pure cost-benefits discussion, if you don’t live in a swing state and your time is even marginally valuable to you, you should not waste time voting for president. People talking about your civic duty to vote convey a nice idea, but there’s no denying the electoral math.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t vote at all! The US is somewhat democracy obsessed, and there are usually very important other races to vote for. Senate and House races are often not very close, so you’ll have to check to see if your own local elections are projected to be close (the Cook Political ratings for House, Senate, and Governor are good places to start), but local elections and direct ballot referendums are much more likely to be competitive and will often affect voters’ lives more directly than federal elections. Of course, these also require a bit more research than presidential elections where information is plentiful.

The other point is that voting is fun. Americans love voting, because it feels like you’re involved in something bigger. Even if, mathematically, you’re not part of something at the federal level, you have the ability to make impacts on your local area.

Should You Vote For A Third Party?

We’ve already discussed that your presidential vote is worthless if you don’t live in a swing state (assuming they have any value at all). However, given that people can still find good reasons to vote in local elections, a local voter will already be in a position to cast a vote for president. The marginal cost of voting for president will be a matter of seconds. Given that, should you vote for a third party?

If you don’t live in a swing state, the answer is obviously yes. Of course, this assumes you actually prefer a third party to the normal Republican and Democrat choices. I don’t think this is too hard, and you can fill out surveys like isidewith.com and see what other political choices are available. Especially this year, there are plenty of people on the left disappointed with Hillary Clinton’s lack of integrity and hawkish foreign policy. And on the right, there are plenty people who would rather not vote for Donald Trump for any of several thousand reasons. If you don’t live in Florida/Pennsylvania/Ohio/North Carolina/Virginia, then there is no reason not to vote for a third party, as the outcome of non-swing states is already decided. If the outcome for any non-swing state is in danger, then the election is a landslide victory anyway (i.e. if Georgia is competitive, Hillary already won, so vote your conscience).

There’s also good reason to vote for a third party you like rather than leave that part of the ballot blank; Republicans and Democrats have been making it difficult for third parties to get onto the ballot for decades. The latest idea of the NeverTrump Republicans is to draft Evan McMullin to run for president. Well guess what? People won’t be able to vote for him in most states because of how difficult Republicans and Democrats have made it to get on the ballot. But people who vote for third parties in November will be directly helping those parties surpass ballot access requirements for the next election cycle. Many states allow automatic ballot access for the next election cycle if a party receives 3-5% of the vote in an election, depending on the state.

Should You Vote For A Third Party In A Swing State?

If you do live in a swing state, chances are you should vote for third party anyway! Most elections become less uncertain as we get closer to election day, and the chances of your swing state being both competitive and the decisive state are very low. In the last 10 elections, 2012, 2008, 1996, 1992, 1988, 1984, and 1980 were not particularly competitive. It actually didn’t matter who you voted for in these elections. In 2004, John Kerry needed over 100,000 additional voters (out of almost 5.6 million cast) in Ohio to win, and while in retrospect that’s a fair margin, it was within the margin of error for polls. It seems that most knew Ohio would be the big battleground state. But even if you combine all third party voters in Ohio, there’s not nearly enough to cover the margin. We could say that over 100,000 Bush supporters in Ohio could have voted for a third party without changing the outcome of the election. That’s a lot of people. In 1976, Ford only needed about 50,000 votes in Wisconsin and Ohio and he would have gotten 4 more years. It turns out that there were a substantial amount of third party votes for Eugene McCarthy, but it’s unlikely McCarthy voters were about to side with Ford over Carter. It seems we could say about 50,000 additional third party votes could have been cast in Ohio and Wisconsin instead of being cast for Carter.

Now the most famous case of third party votes changing an election is Florida in 2000. Here Bush beat Gore by around 500 or so votes, while Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, received almost 100,000 votes. We should not discount Nader supporters; they knew they had the option to support Al Gore if they wanted to. They decided they’d rather vote for Nader, which is certainly their prerogative. The question should be, if they had a choice, would 500 more Florida Nader supporters have favored Al Gore being president over George W. Bush? If so, the the Green Party caused the president to be someone Green Party supporters did not prefer. It’s also likely quite a few more than 500 Nader supporters would have wanted a Gore presidency over a Bush presidency with Nader being a far left-of-center candidate.

But we have to emphasize that the 2000 Florida situation is simply unlikely; most elections are not close, and even when they are, hundreds of thousands of voters are needed to change the outcome, not 500. If there is a chance of a swing state being the decisive state, and you happen to live in that state, and you have strong preferences between the two major party candidates, you could make an argument that you should vote for a major party over a third party, but that’s the only situation where there’s even an argument.

Another way I put it on facebook when discussing this year’s election with someone who opposed Trump:

“If Johnson voters would otherwise vote for Clinton, and if those voters live in a swing state, and if the election is close enough where 1 or 2 states could decide the election, and if Clinton were to lose by a margin smaller than the amount of Johnson voters who would vote for her, then a vote for Johnson is a vote that could cost Clinton the election. But it’s still not quite as bad as a vote for Trump.”

Remember, this is the only criteria for why you should vote for a Republican or Democratic presidential candidate. Even if you like them more than third party candidates, if it’s not a swing in a decisive election, it’s irrelevant that you vote for those candidates. The additional margin of victory changes nothing for them, and they already have ballot access.

The American electoral college was built to choose a president among many different candidates. Thus, in most states, you can vote for your ideal candidate without issue. The concept of “wasting” a vote on a third party makes no sense in most contexts because the electoral college will ensure that your vote is a “waste” already. If the election were a direct popular vote, voting for a third party would be a bigger issue (an issue that could be solved easily via instant runoff voting). But we don’t have that system. Anyone who claims that voting for Gary Johnson or Jill Stein is a “wasted vote” is just announcing that they prefer a main party candidate to a third party candidate. Trying to guilt voters who disagree with them to switch sides without convincing them why their candidate is actually better is an excellent political strategy. But as demonstrated here, there is no logic behind this reasoning beyond “I want my team to get more votes”. If their team isn’t worthy of getting your vote, don’t give it to them.

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Thanks to Stuart Langridge for his tips on making sortable html tables.

Picture credit: Gary Johnson by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0

Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Now that we basically have our two major candidates, let’s do a retrospective look at some of the political candidates our system was able to produce, reject, or approve over this election cycle. Let’s start with Republicans.

In early 2015, the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the Democratic nominee. She looked like a strong candidate but one with a low ceiling; she had great name recognition and experience, but also was (and is) tied to the Obama administration, especially its foreign policy. I’d argue she’s appeared even weaker over the course of the primaries than she did in 2015 as big swaths of Democrats have shown hesitation to embrace her candidacy. Given this situation, Republicans should have been able to come up with candidates that played well against Hillary; what they got is someone who (as of May 2016), isn’t very competitive. If only there had been someone else to pick from!

Wikipedia counts 17 Republican candidates. We won’t spend lots of time on all of them, but it’s worth seeing some of the candidates that were rejected. Continue reading Your Candidate Sucks: Democracy Troubles

Polarization

Authoritarianism

Corruption

Incompetence

Future of Conservatism

Why Do We Vote?

Should you vote at all?

The Close Elections Assumption

Costs

Benefits

Governor

House

Senate

The Electoral College

Additional Offices

But What If It’s Not Close?

Third Parties in Close Elections

Footnotes

Congressional Power

Liberalizing Immigration

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Catastrophic Risk

Other Topics

Candidates’ Priorities Matter Too

Postlibertarian Specific

World Events

Predictions for 2017:

World Events

Postlibertarian

Trump: The Troll

The Unknown

The Incompetence

The Policy

The Authoritarianism

Voting Power

Where Votes Matter

Should You Vote At All?

Should You Vote For A Third Party?

Should You Vote For A Third Party In A Swing State?